Not All White, Still All Nerdy
MIT never seemed like a feasible option for college for me. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was something for Nobel Laureates, audio company founders, renowned architects, and Iron Man. Not for me, someone who applied to MIT without any expectation of acceptance whatsoever.
Ask SIPB
This week’s column covers electronic communication at MIT — e-mail, mailing lists, and zephyr.
Ask SIPB
Welcome, especially to freshmen and new grad students! Ask SIPB is a column published semi-regularly by the Student Information Processing Board, the volunteer student group concerned with computing at MIT, to help students like you learn more about the computing resources MIT provides and how to make effective use of them. Look for more columns in the future, and feel free to stop by the SIPB office (W20-557) or e-mail <i>sipb@mit.edu</i> with questions about computing at MIT.
Squid vs. Whale
You did it! You graduated! And now this fall you are going to leave MIT and enter the world as a man. That’s right. Class of 2009, bitches. Think of all that lies ahead of you. A new apartment, rocking the lower middle class with your entry-level salary. On your own now, limitless possibilities, unbounded awesomeness. Moving to the big city, impressing the ladies with your status, you professional auteur. Isn’t this exciting?
Brouhaha Rhythm
Game shows and personal dignity have never had the friendliest of relationships. They’re probably more like mortal enemies, with game shows as the sadistic dystopian empire and dignity as the underdog hero unable to sway the masses to his cause. Or, depending on the show, as the helpless orphan crushed under the boots of the faceless legions as an example to would-be underdog heroes.
Quarkiness
Earlier this summer, in the name of physics research, I was away in the distant lands of Cornell University. It’s a place that harbors more grass, flowers, trees, and cows than MIT can ever hope to accommodate. However, the natural beauty of Cornell’s campus was not enough to mask a certain flaw in its design: There was no Cornellian analogue to our Infinite Corridor. With few indoor routes to take to work, the weather became a lot easier to notice—and experience.
Squid vs. Whale
<i>Herein lies the tale of one fateful night, a subway ride, and the story of how my friend got felt up by a 72-year-old man and was presumed dead, as told from his point of view. Names have been changed to protect the humiliated.</i>
Brouhaha Rhythm
A couple winters back, I bought a jigsaw puzzle from a yard sale. The picture was of one of those hot air balloon gatherings, with lots of bright colors and patterns to match together. When you’re staring at a Virginia winter out your window with hardly any snowfall to motivate going outside, it’s one way to pass the time.
Love, Loss, and Life@MIT
When I came to MIT as a freshman more than four years ago, I was excited for the challenge. One of the first things I heard at MIT was the oft-repeated parable about the bell curve, or, as we engineers might call it, a normal distribution. I forget who told me it first. Perhaps it was my freshman advisor, but it goes something like this: “If you were to put every student on a bell curve, MIT accepts only the highest one percent. You’re used to being in that top one percent, but now that you’re here, that curve starts all over. You won’t always be the best. You won’t always even be average.”
Talk Nerdy to Me
Since the fourth grade, I’ve needed glasses — but I didn’t start wearing them until the fifth grade.
Squid vs. Whale
We need to talk. The status quo has to end. We can’t keep sneaking out to the Four Seasons on Thursdays while I’m pretending to take my son to Little League. I’m an important person and the press have been stalking my SUV since last Tuesday. If we keep up this steamy love affair, sooner or later it’ll explode all over the papers.
Brouhaha Rhythm
Recent quasi-sporting events have led me to ponder why we root for underdogs. They are the independents in life’s many arenas, from the cultural to the entrepreneurial to the athletic.
Talk Nerdy To Me
On the way back to Boston for this summer, I lost my MacBook. Yes, I am careless enough to leave a laptop in a cab. In my defense, I flew back with my cat, Duke, and, having put my laptop underneath his carrier, I was more concerned about getting Duke situated than making sure I had everything.
GADGET REVIEW Bippity Boppity Bing: Microsoft’s New Thingamabob Doesn’t Quite Do the Job
And maybe it never will.
Gadget Review
<b>What it is:</b> Apple’s newest iPod Shuffle, a portable music player that holds 4 gigabytes of songs (about 72 hours, more than a thousand songs).
Sidebar: We Shot It
We lost our first iPod Shuffle. To keep the second one from getting away, we decided to shoot it. As it turned out, the iPod’s lightweight aluminum case proved no defense against an expert marksman’s rifle.
Brouhaha Rhythm
Coming home for the summer from MIT has been a time-honored tradition for me, assuming two years is sufficient to establish a tradition. As lovely as I hear Boston gets in the summertime, there’s too much waiting for me at home — family, friends, a significant other, and a job — for me to stay. Assuming, therefore, that going home would be my first and only choice for my summer plans, it logically followed that I’d have to bundle up the entire contents of my hovel and put most of it in storage, a process that consumed more time and more space than I probably would have liked.
Brouhaha Rhythm
I got my MIT class ring, or “Brass Rat,” last Friday, along with the other jewelry-inclined members of the class of 2011 who bought them, and I have to be honest, it’s taking some getting used to. I consider myself to be a non-aesthetically-minded sort of person (because it sounds nicer than “fashion-handicapped”), and an engraved beaver visible from orbit isn’t what I usually think of as a digital accessory. Yet here I am, staring at the hunk of metal on my finger and twiddling it back and forth like an indecisive electric screwdriver.
Talk Nerdy To Me
When I run into people these days, I sometimes get asked, “Are you still writing your column?” If you’ve been following, my articles, this term, have been much more sporadic, and it’s not because I’m running low on material. If anything, I’ve been having more sex rather than less.